Through six stages of colonialism

The history of ancient Australia is writ large with 60,000 years of inhabitation by humans in the loosest sense. However, we cannot directly assume the first human inhabitants of Australia were the direct cultural predecessors of modern Aboriginal and First Nations people, as the vast gulf of time and overlapping patchworks of art styles indicate that the cultures of millennia ago may have hewed to a different path than the cultures which existed immediately prior to European invasion and colonisation. This is not to interject any lack of ties to the past; we must accept and believe that cultures can evolve and grow and mature and that traditions in the past may fall away or be modified, without removing from those alive today, their connections with the past - even if these people were they to meet, could scarcely communicate or recognise one another. It is without doubt that Aboriginality has temporal and cultural depth that are enmeshed.

But so, too, we must recognise that Australian culture, though it is young, has depth beyond 120 years or even 220 years - that span of time encapsulating the transmutation of coloniser-states melting slowly into a semi-sovereign Australian State. Here, it is worth noting as the Conservatives do, that Anglo Australians carry with them ten thousand years of European agronomic culture, and around a thousand years of Anglican religious culture (before that, Celtic, Norse an other themes if you want them) and a scarce 200 years of modern industrial work ethics. This suffuses us in the way that Aboriginality infuses the First Nations.

Add to this mixture the immigration that Australia has embarked upon in the past 60 to 70 years after the government abandoned the so-called "White Australia Policy". We now have a melting pot of every culture on Earth. Little wonder we struggle to enunciate Australian values for everyone.

So here we are, smooshed together on the continent, but our laws are founded in the Magna Carta (as people of such illiteracy with the law as Wayne Glew will happily and forcefully remind you). Our laws are British. We have, this year, seen how we are not yet quite 100% sovereign, with out calumnous Governor General adhering to the letter of the law as he allowed our former PM and his Attorney General to usurp 'convention' and seize multiple secret Ministries, almost like Machiavelli seizing power in an Italian pricipate, via stealth and sleight of hand. It is in this foetid mixture of British tradition, decorum, convention and actual written law, that we find ourselves navigating a proposed Voice To Parliament and recognition of Aboriginal and First Nations laws and our own semi-sovereignty.

Watching the rhetoric and politics, and recent changes in the law (the Aboriginal Heritage Act, for one) I note that non-Aboriginal Australia is being - fairly, it must be said - confronted and challenged on its legitimacy by Aboriginal people. The rhetoric is both conciliatory and punitive. Not much of it hints at true reconciliation in my lifetime, and I will argue here, we should not expect it.

The Phases of Reconciliation

I see six phases of white presence on this continent, and we aren't anywhere near the end.

Invasion

The earliest phase was invasion. But at the beginning, the colony at Port Jackson was run by the rule of law. White colonists (convicts, usually) were tried and executed for murder of indigenous peoples, at least at the start of the colony, prior to 1820. This early phase respected some rights, but not the right to land. It is the rhetorical invalidation of nationhood which gives license to invasion of others lands, as in Ukraine today, was it in New South Wales in the 18th and 19th centuries. But the truly violent part of the invasion took a while to kick off and was informed by events elsewhere in the British Empire such as the so-called Indian Mutiny, which saw British Army veterans settled in Queensland and carry on their war crimes against the indigenous population in places named after their last postings, such as Surat, Taroom, Quetta. Names of generals and officers - Wellington, Cornwall - spring up alongside statues and suburbs named after colonisers, slavers and blackbirders.

Colonisation

Once the indigenous population was militarily defeated, colonisation commenced. The imposition of physical violence commuted into institutional violence centred around land theft and imposition of imported, colonial laws. This was assisted by the plagues and epidemics of imported diseases and massacres inflicted on the indigenous peoples and growing population and military strength of the British Empire in Australia. This period, it could be argued, overlapped waves of invasion, as British power projected further inland, on the heels of the explorers we idolise. Here, towns are named after politicians as much as anything else, certifying the aspirations of the colony to self-governance. The period ends when, self-governance achieved, the colonies become responsible for themselves and all their bloody history. Colonisation ends somewhere between the gold rushes that spawned the need for independence, and the referendum that assured it. Colony ends when nationhoob begins - but whose nation? A single nation of a handful of States smeared on top of hundreds of First Nations, deeply buried under a fictitious doctrine of terra nullius.

Oppression

The third stage was oppression, and ran from ~1901 through, it can be argued, to somewhere between Mabo and today. As white society became ever more complex with technology and sophisticated of financial mechanisms, the laws around treating Aboriginal people and Aboriginality evolved, if that's the right word, and became ever more so complicated. The boundaries of the boxes into which we forced indigenous peoples were ever more carefully described, and the contents ever so sorely compressed.

This is especially true as the Australian ethos of a 'fair go' espoused by ornery miners in Ballarat and the union taverns of Sydney and Melbourne in the 1920-2 to 1960's rubbed up against the buried history of oppression and racism that was still in effect (and quietly ignored). The laws of oppression were deployed against an ostensibly egalitarian society by the governments of the day but their toll fell unequally on the have-nots of the working class and the indigenous. This was the age of women's suffrage and feminism contrasted against laws maintained on the books treating Aboriginal people as if they were cattle, chattel and wild animals. We instituted minimum wages and award wages for some, whilst stealing the labour of others. We stole everyone's children, from single mothers in poor neighbourhoods to babe in arms in the bush; we accepted stolen children from Britain during the war, and stolen children from the reservations with equal ease. The toll disproportionally affected the indigenous people, as it was but one of manifold legal means of maintaining control of people the state considered problem. Giving Aboriginal people the vote barely affected the whole structure of power, disenfranchisement and predatory disadvantage.

This persisted until 2022 (yes), with the Intervention, a paramilitary putsch aimed at control and suppression, ostensibly to control child abuse and substance abuse, but prolonged for 15 years or more. Lives were better off, it was argued; but barely. We instituted patronising Indue Cards, a cynical rort to enrich Liberal Party factional backers that spent more money delivering the services than actually servicing the victims - evidence that power propagates its own rewards at the expense of the powerless.

Rapprochement

However, despite the self-organising power of Laws to persist and multiply (consider that Law and precedent form a self-organising logic chain that inevitably builds upon itself) injustice as much as justice (logic can be flawed, and building upon an unjust and flawed law will merely empower injustice), the power of the Fair Go and humanistic tendencies on the Left saw recognition of indigenous rights grow. This is the granting of the right to vote, of Midnight Oil and Mabo.

The rapprochement is upon us, with children these days learning local indigenous names for birds, flowers and trees; learning the mythos and history of the First Nations, and referring to the land upon which they stand as Aboriginal land. Always was, always will be.

The rapprochement is a progress under way; re-writing laws and re-imagining what it is to be Australia, and Australian. It is, as Australia is, incomplete, shoddy, and unfinished. We saw, this year, the colonial constitution thrown into a shambles. Constitutional Monarchy was the foil against a Republic, with the rubric of "trust old Queen Bess to never interfere, 'ere we end up with Trump and more" ossifying our apathy toward genuine civic concern in seizing our own self-governance. How fitting that Australia is an unfinished pavlova, yet to rise, or maybe already a failure, hollowed out and cracked, deflated on itself, with a confection of cream and fruit on top hiding the shambolic structure below. And yes, as the pavlova, Australia is a stolen idea, received from afar, not created from whole cloth anew.

Re(tri/sti)tution

The fifth phase is just beginning; one part retribution and one part restitution. We are beginning to repay the blood and toil spilled and stolen, in the only way we know how: money. We have a lot to pay for, and the butcher's bill is long.

The massacres. The stolen land. The stolen children. The indoctrination and cultural erasure of whole peoples. The patrimonious debit cards and debts of work accrued every fortnight as we seek to make cultures that have never recognised a work ethic hew to one that we, ourselves, are finding unfit, unhealthy and unwise.

Granted rights, and rights to land, we find ourselves losing what we had assumed empty with terra nullius; roaming freely through the outback, we find every corner claimed and owned, as if anew. But it's always been owned, we have just used colonialism to deny it. There is an affront to this, a recognition of trespass, and anger at our own guilt. What is right suddenly seems unfair. The symbology of Lydia Thorpe in Parliament affronts those who see their power waning. The same old complaints from the same old people.

But to be clear, equality regained by the lesser party may feel like a loss to the greater party, who confuses equity and equality with a loss. This isn't true. And, to be fair, we are due a retribution. A locking-out, as we once locked out. A walking away and an unhelpfulness, and a turning of the cheek. If our systems continue to punish (and they do) and refuse to recognise and refuse to make good, then we should expect push-back. It is on Australia to change itself.

Like the rapprochement, this restitution and push-back is only beginning. The logic of the Laws changed, like a prion begins to change the proteins inexorably to a different shape, with Mabo. Having accepted terra nullius a fiction, precedent grows upon precedent, and we hand back (or recognise claim to) more and more land, and the Laws grow ever stronger.

Reconciliation

I said earlier, I don't see true reconciliation for a long while. This is because, as alluded to earlier, cultures change and societies change relatively slowly. We also, due to colonialism and oppression, haven't even begun stopping all the damage we have wrought. Though, that's just how modern society works - giving with one hand, and abusing with the same hand later. Little wonder the most disadvantaged and dispossessed amongst us remain disadvantaged and dispossessed.

It is arguable that Australia truly needs to become a Republic. We need to refashion our constitution, the recent events have shown this well enough. If we are to have an Indigenous Voice to Parliament without a shared vision of what Australia is to be, then it will be as always, as shambolic as a collapsed pav. The Voice should not become a smear of cream atop a failed edifice, subject to cunning lawyers to exploit poorly written "convention" and exploit a Governor General installed to be a foreign sovereign's ace in the hole, never to be used. Except, he was used, twice. Neither time was our shit show of semi-sovereignty covered in glitter. Are we to believe that what we cannot fix in ourselves, we should expect Indigenous Australians to fix for themselves, to suit us and our unfinished mess?

What if we have a Voice to a Parliament that is illegitimate itself? It's hardly a recipe for permanent harmony.

We have begun to frame laws and regulations and, more importantly, ways of being on this country that mesh imported cultures with Indigenous cultures. Our children learn more in 2 years about indigenous cultures than I ever did the entirety of my schooling. Land claim and determinations have handed some rights to land back, and more are to come, until nothing is left "unclaimed" as it once was considered to be.

However, this process is in its infancy. We may acknowledge aboriginal custody and lineage within and on Country, and be called 'woke' for it by the chuds. But it isn't Australia. True reconciliation, where any Australian child may grow up and move about within and around Indigenous cultures effortlessly, is a long way off because it is non-Indigenous Australia which has to adapt first.

We have to expect that cultures can mature and adapt. For such an allegedly young culture, we must hope that in the future, a few decades from now, we are more mature than today and we can adapt and change. Indeed, we will need to. Physical Australia isn't a continent we can refashion to suit ourselves. Metaphysical Australia is hardly different.